The place of A.C. Bradley in the history of Shakespeare criticism may be judged by the following lines from the pen of some forgotten wag of the 1920s, which places it a couple of decades after the publication of Shakespearean Tragedy and a decade before Bradley's death, in 1935:
I dreamt last night that Shakespeare's Ghost
Sat for a civil service post.
The English paper for that year
Had several questions on King Lear--
Which Shakespeare answered very badly,
Because he hadn't read his Bradley.
The most interesting droppings from the Wikipedia entry for Bradley concern how he was the youngest of 21 [sic] children born to the preacher Charles Bradley and his second wife, a circumstance that may account for Bradley never marrying and living for much of his adult life with one of his many sisters: I imagine each of them, at some point in their young lives, separately considering the crowded conditions in the parsonage and concluding that there must be a better way to live.
Shakespearean Tragedy is largely a commentary on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, which are taken up in turn and in the order of probable composition. For the general reader, the attraction is accessibility. Over and over again, you read something and think it's exactly right and would have occurred to you, too, if only you were as smart and careful a reader as Bradley. For example:
Imagine Goneril uttering the famous words [of Lady Macbeth, explaining why she had not herself killed Duncan], Had he not resembled/My father as he slept, I had done 't. They are spoken, I think, without any sentiment--impatiently, as though she regretted her weakness: but it was there.
I wonder whether Bradley's choice of plays to discuss elevated them above the others (so strong has been his influence), or whether he chose them because they were already regarded as preeminent. It does seem that Hamlet, the first of them, likely written in 1600, the year Shakespeare turned 36, represents a new phase: it's about half again as long as any of its approximately twenty predecessors in the drama and contains more than 600 words that Shakespeare had not till then deployed in any play or poem. He also for the first time abandons plot plausibility in order to create swirling effects of psychological disturbance, despair, savagery, and nihilism--effects that carry through in Othello (1603?), King Lear (1605?), and Macbeth (1606?). The implications for Shakespeare's biography are intriguing but Bradley's focus is on these four plays, especially the characters. One learns to keep one's guard up and not be knocked out by famous, soaring passages that are frequently turned in some way by a terse and regrettably forgotten reply.
Macbeth:
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
Doctor:
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.
And from The Tempest:
Miranda:
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in 't!
Prospero:
'Tis new to thee.
Comments